Books of The Times Books of The Times At Last, Kurt Vonnegut's Famous Dresden Book SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE OR THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE By Kurt Vonnegut Jr. urt Vonnegut Jr., an indescribable writer whose seven previous books are like nothing else on earth, was accorded the dubious pleasure of witnessing a 20th-century apocalypse. During World War II, at the age of 23, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned beneath the city of Dresden, "the Florence of the Elbe." He was there on Feb. 13, 1945, when the Allies firebombed Dresden in a massive air attack that killed 130,000 people and destroyed a landmark of no military significance. Next to being born, getting married and having children, it is probably the most important thing that ever happened to him. And, as he writes in the introduction to "Slaughterhouse-Five," he's been trying to write a book about Dresden ever since. Now, at last, he's finished the "famous Dresden book." In the same introduction, which should be read aloud to children, cadets and basic trainees, Mr.

Vonnegut pronounces his book a failure "because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." He's wrong and he knows it. Kurt Vonnegut knows all the tricks of the writing game. So he has not even tried to describe the bombing. Instead he has written around it in a highly imaginative, often funny, nearly psychedelic story. The story is sandwiched between an autobiographical introduction and epilogue. Fact and Fiction Combined The odd combination of fact and fiction forces a question upon the reader: how did the youth who lived through the Dresden bombing grow up to be the man who wrote this book? One reads "Slaughterhouse-Five" with that question crouched on the brink of one's awareness. I'm not sure if there's an answer, but the question certainly heightens the book's effects. Here is the story: Billy Pilgrim, "tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola," was born in Ilium, N.Y., the only child of a barber there. After graduating from Ilium High School, he attended night sessions at the Ilium School of Optometry for one semester before being drafted for military service in World War II.

He served with the infantry in Europe, and was taken prisoner by the Germans. He was in Dresden when it was firebombed. After the war, he went back to Ilium and became a wealthy optometrist married to a huge wife named Valencia. They had two children, a daughter named Barbara who married an optometrist, and a son named Robert who became a Green Beret in Vietnam. In 1968, Billy was the sole survivor of a plane crash on top of Sugarbush Mountain in Vermont. While he was recovering in the hospital, Valencia was killed in a carbon- monoxide accident. On Feb. 13, 1976, Billy was assassinated by a nut with a high- powered laser gun. As you can see, there is much absurd violence in this story. But it is always scaled down to the size of Billy Pilgrim's world, which makes it more unbearable and more obligatory for the reader to understand the author's explanation for it. As I said, Mr. Vonnegut knows all the tricks.

Now there are two things I haven't yet told you about Billy Pilgrim, and I'm hesitant to do so, because when I tell you what they are you'll want to put Kurt Vonnegut back in the science-fiction category he's been trying to climb out of, and you'll be wrong. First, Billy is "unstuck in time" and "has no control over where he is going next." "He is in a constant state of stage fright...because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next." Story Told Fluidly This problem of Billy's enables Mr. Vonnegut to tell his story fluidly, jumping forward and backward in time, free from the strictures of chronology. And this problem of Billy's is related to the second thing, which is that Billy says that on his daughter's wedding night he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from the planet Tralfamadore, flown there through a time warp, and exhibited with a movie star named Montana Wildhack.

The Tralfamadorians are two feet high, green, and shaped like plumber's friends, with suctions caps on the ground and little green hands with eyes on their palms at the top of their shafts. They are wise, and they teach Billy Pilgrim many things. They teach him that humans cannot see time, which is really like "a stretch of the rocky Mountains, " with all moments in the past, the present and the future, always existing. "The Tralfamadorians...can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them." They teach Billy that death is just an unpleasant moment. Because Billy can go back and forth in time, he knew this lesson when he was in Dresden. In 1976, when he was assassinated, Billy Pilgrim was trying to bring this message to the world. He knew he would die, but he did not mind. "Farewell, hello, farewell, hello," he said. I now, I know (as Kurt Vonnegut used to say when people told him that the Germans attacked first). It sounds crazy. It sounds like a fantastic last-ditch effort to make sense of a lunatic universe.

But there is so much more to this book. It is very tough and very funny; it is sad and delightful; and it works. But is also very Vonnegut, which mean you'll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner. Slaughterhouse-Five banned by US school | Books | The Guardian Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five banned by US school Kurt Vonnegut's celebrated second world war satire censored along with teen novel Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler Kurt Vonnegut in 2001. Photograph: Janet Knott/AP Friday 29 July 2011 07.48 EDT First published on Friday 29 July 2011 07.48 EDT Close This article is 5 years old Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and young adult novel Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler have both been banned from a school curriculum and library in a Missouri school following complaints from a local professor about children being exposed to " shocking material ".

Ockler's novel, which tells of a girl's summer romance as she attempts to get over the death of her first love a year earlier, is being removed from the school curriculum and library in Republic, Missouri, along with Kurt Vonnegut's classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. The ban follows a complaint from Wesley Scroggins, a professor at Missouri State University, who wrote in a column for a local paper last year claiming that Vonnegut's novel "contains so much profane language, it would make a sailor blush with shame". He said that Ockler's book, described by Kirkus Reviews as a "sincere, romantic tearjerker", "glorifies drunken teen parties, where teen girls lose their clothes in games of strip beer pong", and laid into Laurie Halse Anderson's acclaimed novel Speak, which he felt "should be classified as soft pornography". Scroggins's complaints sparked a review by the district school board, which voted this week to keep Speak but to remove the novels by Vonnegut and Ockler. Twenty Boy Summer focused on "sensationalising sexual promiscuity", Superintendent Vern Minor told the News-Leader .

"I just don't think it's a good book. I don't think it's consistent with these standards and the kind of message that we want to send," he said. "If the book had ended on a different note, I might have thought differently." Slaughterhouse-Five, meanwhile, contains "really, really intense" language and does not have "any place in high school", according to Minor. Following the decision to remove her novel from school shelves in Missouri, Ockler said that "you can ban my books from every damn district in the country — I'm still not going to write to send messages or make teens feel guilty because they've made choices that some people want to pretend don't exist. That's my choice. And I'll never be ashamed of my choice to write about real issues." Writing on her blog , Ockler was adamant that "not every teen who has sex or experiments with drinking feels remorseful about it. Not every teen who has sex gets pregnant, gets someone pregnant, or contracts an STD. Not every teen who has sex does so while in a serious relationship.

Not every teen who has sex outside of a relationship feels guilty, shameful, or regretful later on." The "crazy train", she added, "has finally derailed" following the Missouri ban. "Look, I've said it before and I'll say it a million times more. I get that my book isn't appropriate for all teens, and that some parents are opposed to the content. That's fine. Read it and decide for your own family. I wish more parents would do that — get involved in their kids' reading and discuss the issues the books portray. But don't make that decision for everyone else's family by limiting a book's availability and burying the issue under guise of a 'curriculum discussion'." Scroggins, meanwhile, told the News Leader that while it was "unfortunate [the board] chose to keep the other book [Speak] ... I congratulate them for doing what's right and removing the two books". SparkNotes: Slaughterhouse-Five: Chapter 1 Chapter 1 page 1 of 2 Summary It is so short and jumbled and jangled . . . because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.

(See Important Quotations Explained ) Vonnegut writes in his own voice, introducing his experience of the firebombing of Dresden, in eastern Germany, during World War II while he was a prisoner of war and his attempt for many years to complete a book on the subject. He begins with the claim that most of what follows is true, particularly the parts about war. With funding from the Guggenheim Foundation, Vonnegut and his wartime friend Bernhard V. O’Hare return to Dresden in 1967. In a taxi on the way to the Dresden slaughterhouse that served as their prison, Vonnegut and O’Hare strike up a conversation with the cab driver about life under communism. It is to this man, Gerhard Müller, as well as to O’Hare’s wife, Mary, that Vonnegut dedicates Slaughterhouse-Five. Müller later sends O’Hare a Christmas card with wishes for world peace. Vonnegut relates his unsuccessful attempts to write about Dresden in the twenty-three years since he was there during the war. He is very proud of the outline of the story that he draws in crayon on the back of a roll of wallpaper.

The wallpaper outline represents each character in a different color of crayon, with a line for each progressing through the story’s chronology. Eventually the lines enter a zone of orange cross-hatching, which represents the firebombing, and those who survive the attack emerge and finally stop at the point when the POWs are returned. However, the outline does not help Vonnegut’s writing. He initially expected to craft a masterpiece about this grave and immense subject, but, while the horrific destruction he witnessed occupies his mind over the years, it defies his attempts to capture it in writing. Vonnegut’s antiwar stance only adds to the difficulty, since, as a filmmaker acquaintance remarks to him, writing a book against war would prevent war as effectively as writing a book against glaciers would prevent their motion. Vonnegut recounts the events of his postwar life, including a stints as a student of anthropology at the University of Chicago, a police reporter, and a public relations man for General Electric in Schenectady, New York. In the years following the war, Vonnegut encounters ignorance about the magnitude of Dresden’s destruction, and when he contacts the U.S.

Air Force for information, he discovers that the event is still classified as top secret. Around 1964, Vonnegut takes his young daughter and her friend with him to visit Bernhard V. O’Hare in Pennsylvania. He meets Mary O’Hare, who is disgusted by the likelihood that Vonnegut will portray himself and his fellow soldiers as manly heroes rather than the “babies” they were. With his right hand raised, Vonnegut vows not to glorify war and promises to call his book The Children’s Crusade. Later that night he reads about the Children’s Crusade and the earlier bombing of Dresden in 1760. While teaching at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Vonnegut lands a contract to write three books, of which Slaughterhouse-Five is to be the first. It is so short and jumbled, he explains, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. 1 Michael Crichton: Sci-Fi and Vonnegut | New Republic By Michael Crichton September 24, 2013 In honor of Banned Books Week, we'll be publishing our original reviews of frequently banned books.

In 1969, a then relatively unknown Michael Crichton—who would go on to write some of the best-selling science fiction of all time—reviewed Kurt Vonnegut's latest novel, Slaughterhouse Five. In an ambivalent take, Crichton called it "hideous, ghastly, murderous—and calm." A look at the bookstore shelves will prove it: science fiction is coming back. After a dry period in the early sixties, people are beginning to read it again, and write it. The renewed interest has carried into other fields as well, particularly television and films: "Star Trek" gathered a vociferous and cultish following; a paperback version of Fantastic Voyage sold more than a million copies; Stanley Kubrick's "2001" was the most expensive science fiction film ever made. The diehard sci-fi addict will view all this with pleasure and a grim sense of vindication, for it has traditionally been true that one cannot acceptably admit to a taste for science fiction, except among scientists or teenagers. And these two groups share a strikingly low standard of literary attainment, and a correspondingly high tolerance for mangled prose.

Certainly the new ventures in films and television represent improvements over, say, Steve McQueen fighting “The Blob” or Buzz Corry of the "Spa-a-a-ace Patrol!" But this is not to say that science fiction is any better now, as literature, than it ever was. A look at the bookstore shelves will prove this, too: The vast majority of science fiction writing is abysmal. It is perhaps paradoxical that our most technologically advanced fiction should also be the most technically inadequate. Most science fiction writers cannot put together a literate sentence; only a handful can create a reasonable character; perhaps a dozen, at most, can sustain a simple plot. There is no good explanation for the ineptitude of science fiction, as fiction. There is a commercial explanation (that the readers will put up with this stuff); there is a historical one (that science fiction has its origins in pulp fiction). And there is another: that science fiction represents, as a form, a subordination of all fictional elements to an idea—just as detective fiction represents a subordination of all elements to plot. Only the commercial explanation, which is really no more than a simple observation of verifiable fact, holds water; the others are demonstrably wrong.

For example, nearly all fictional forms have come from pulp, or its equivalent in previous generations. The majority of "classic" authors were very popular in their day. And when one surveys the great triad of pulp writing—science fiction, westerns, and detective fiction—from the early part of this century, the results are interesting. Westerns, being closest to the heart of American mythology, have been almost entirely absorbed by the ubiquitous tube. Detectives have done well in films, less well on television; in straight fiction their standards have been raised markedly, partly because "real" authors like Conrad and Graham Greene have dabbled in the form and partly because talented writers have been drawn to it—Raymond Chandler, David Cornwall, and Georges Simenon. But science fiction has remained impervious to such influences. It is still as pulpy, and as awful, as ever. Nor can the argument that science fiction relies upon the idea over all other elements be sustained. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells between them laid out nearly all the problems, and all the gadgetry, which have since become science fiction staples.

These authors are no longer widely read, not because their ideas are wrong—indeed, to an astonishing degree they are correct—but because their prancing romanticism, their treatment of ideas, has fallen out of favor. Much of the resurgence represents a reissue of old names and old titles, from Asimov to Van Vogt, in the kind of publishing cycle that affects all fiction. But there is also new material with new origins and different sources of popularity. And all of it gives reason to believe that science fiction is about to undergo the kind of change that affected detective fiction 20 years ago. Things have happened. Our world is changing rapidly, and as the pace of scientific development accelerates, there is a growing public tolerance for science fiction, a sense that nothing is too fantastic to be impossible. Since new developments produce new uncertainty and flux, readers look to science fiction for views of the future—sometimes, with the utmost seriousness. A number of science fiction writers are now employed as consultants to large corporations, where they are paid to predict future trends of business. Furthermore, the drug experience has opened a new realm for writers in all fields, but perhaps for obvious reasons, it is most easily exploited by writers of fantasy and science fiction.

The Hashbury hippies made a kind of bible out of Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land; Leary and the Airplane grokked sister lovers and water brothers, and in time maybe others. Other science fiction writers, such as J. G. Ballard and Roger Zelazny, have joined the druggie panoply of literary heroes, which includes that old acid-head John Barth, that old juice-freak Malcolm Lowry, W. Y. Evans-Wentz, Celine, Melville, Jorges Luis Borges, P. D. Ouspensky, and Hermann Hesse. Conspicuously absent are the old guard of the left wing, Huxley and Orwell; their books are found in the classroom, not the pad. As a category, the borders of science fiction have always been poorly defined, and they are getting worse. The old distinction between science fiction and fantasy—that science fiction went from the known to the probable, and fantasy dealt with the impossible—is now wholly ignored. The new writing is heavily and unabashedly fantastical. The breakdown is also seen in the authors themselves, who now cross the border, back and forth, with impunity.

At one time this was dangerous and heretical; the only person who could consistently get away with it was Ray Bradbury. Science fiction addicts politely looked the other way when he did books such as Dandelion Wine and the screenplay for John Huston's “Moby Dick.” It was assumed he needed the money. Furthermore, many of the traditional science fiction preserves have been invaded by highly skilled authors, equipped to work on a very high level. Modern science stands as a vast and largely untouched reservoir of metaphor, but very recently a number of "real" authors have begun to draw upon it in various ways. One thinks immediately of Nabokov, Updike and Donleavy, and in a sloppy-effective way, Norman Mailer. (C. P. Snow, as the scientist-novelist most likely to employ the metaphors of science in the service of literature, has shown no inclination to do so, but continues to write about life in the thirteenth century.) It is inevitable that these skilled writers will destroy much of science fiction as a category, just as some of them have begun to put the sex-exploitation novel out of business by writing better novels about sex. Invading a category is, however, much easier than leaving it.

To leave the world of category fiction, with its special section in the book stores, its special reviewers and its special readerships, is both hazardous and difficult. Witness Georges Simenon, who has had extraordinary trouble gaining acceptance in this country as anything other than a detective writer. But the transition is being attempted, with at least one notable success. Exhibit A: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. When I was growing up, everybody knew damn well what Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was. He was a science fiction writer. It said so, in the high school textbooks where his stories were reprinted. And what do you call Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan if not science fiction? Some years ago, he began to drift, but by then there was a new category, black humor, and Vonnegut got stuck into that one. The company was a little more reputable, but the category remained. He was doing God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Mother Night, and Cat’s Cradle. It seemed pretty blackly humorous, all right. And if he didn't have anything nasty to say about his mother, well, he'd get around to it.

He was witty and he was grim, and that was enough. However, with Cat's Cradle he began to get some attention. It came from varied sources: Conrad Aiken, Graham Greene, Marc Connolly and Jules Feiffer, to name a few. Greene called him one of the best living American writers. That sort of comment is guaranteed to make you an "in" writer. He was compared to Jonathan Swift. This is not to say that he has been greeted with unrestrained enthusiasm by all critics. Reviews of his latest book, Slaughterhouse-Five, have dragged out the old complaints: Vonnegut is too cute, Vonnegut is precious, Vonnegut is silly. We live in an age of great seriousness. We are accustomed to getting our art in heavy, pretentious doses. Anything funny is suspect, and anything simple is doubly suspect. Here we come to the second difficulty with Kurt Vonnegut. His style is effortless, naive, almost childlike. There are no big words and no complicated sentences. It is an extraordinarily difficult style, but that fact is lost on anyone who has never tried to write that way. A funny, simple writer is in trouble nowadays.

And Vonnegut doesn't make it any easier for you. He is cheerfully, exuberantly schizophrenic. The man who wrote a book with a stated moral, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be," has described himself by saying, "Imagine me as the White Rock girl, kneeling on a boulder in a nightgown, either looking for minnows or adoring my own reflection." The man who says "this is a hard world to be ludicrous in" admits "to have lived scenes from a woman's magazine"—and to have written those same scenes, in a woman's magazine. "When you're dead, you're dead," he observes, but he also says, "My brand is Pall Mall. The authentic suicides ask for Pall Malls . . ." Of his writing, he has said, "I realize now that the two main themes of my novels were stated by my siblings; 'Here I am cleaning shit off of practically everything,' and ‘No Pain,' " This statement is as true as anything a writer has said of his work; it is also the reason why Vonnegut is so difficult to accept.

He writes about the most excruciatingly painful things. His novels have attacked our deepest fears of automation and the bomb, our deepest political guilts, our fiercest hatreds and loves. Nobody else writes books on these subjects; they are inaccessible to normal novelistic approaches. But Vonnegut, armed with his schizophrenia, takes an absurd, distorted, wildly funny framework which is ultimately anaesthetic. In doing so, his science fiction heritage is clear, but his purposes are very different: he is nearly always talking about the past, not the future. And as he proceeds, from his anaesthetic framework, to clean the shit off, we are able to cheer him on—at least for a while. But eventually we stop cheering, and stop laughing. It is a classic sequence of reactions to any Vonnegut book. One begins smugly, enjoying the sharp wit of a compatriot as he carves up Common Foes. But the sharp wit does not stop, and sooner or later it is directed against the Wrong Targets. Finally it is directed against oneself. It is this switch in midstream, this change in affiliation, which is so disturbing.

He becomes an offensive writer, because he will not choose sides, ascribing blame and penalty, identifying good guys and bad. Mother Night, the clearest antecedent to Slaughterhouse-Five, begins by giving it to the Nazis. That's all right. Then Vonnegut gives it to the Jews, then the American right wing, then the left wing, then the Negroes, then the happily marrieds—and finally manages to reduce any social or political affiliation to total absurdity, while we look on with increasing horror. It is an astonishing book, very gentle and funny and quiet and totally destructive. Nobody escapes without being shown, in a polite way what an ass he is. (And interestingly, the left-wing political activists, who generally count Vonnegut among their number, all have somehow never found time to read this particular book.) A Vonnegut book is not cute or precious. It is literally awful, for Vonnegut is one of the few writers able to lift the lid of the garbage can, and dispassionately examine the contents.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, the author quotes his father as saying, "You never wrote a story with a villain in it." This may be true, but Vonnegut never wrote a story with a hero in it, either. In Slaughterhouse-Five he also says, "Nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting," and it is within this framework that he writes about an event that should qualify for all those adjectives— the firebombing of Dresden, which Vonnegut experienced as a prisoner of war in Germany. There is every indication that this book represents, for Vonnegut, a final statement of his thoughts about this experience. He says so explicitly, just as he says the project is doomed to failure ("There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre"). The book also brings together characters and locales from other books—Howard W. Campbell, Jr., Eliot Rosewater, and Ilium, N.Y., giving the novel a faintly anthological flavor. The book is written in the brief segmental manner he developed in Cat's Cradle, organized as a collection of impressions, scattered in time and space, each told with the kind of economy one associates with poetry.

It is beautifully done, fluid, smooth, and powerful. There is also some business about a distant planet and flying saucers, but that does not make the book science fiction, any more than flippers make a cat a penguin. In the final analysis the book is hideous, ghastly, murderous—and calm. There are just people, doing what people usually do to each other. The ultimate difficulty with Vonnegut is precisely this: that he refuses to say who is wrong. The simplest way out of such a predicament is to say that everybody is wrong but the author. Any number of writers have done it, with good success. But Vonnegut refuses. He ascribes no blame, sets no penalties. His commentary on the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King is the same as his comment on all other deaths: "So it goes," he says, and nothing more. One senses that underneath it all, Vonnegut is a nice man, who doesn't really like to have to say this, but . .

.his description of one character might stand for all mankind in his view: "She had been given the opportunity to participate in civilization, and she had muffed it." And of himself, a comment by another character, the author-Nazipropagandist-pornographer-American spy Howard W. Campbell, Jr. "I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind." So it goes. Read More Sign up for your daily dose of politics, culture, and big ideas. Sign Up SparkNotes: Slaughterhouse-Five: Context Slaughterhouse-Five Table of Contents Plot Overview Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in Indianapolis in 1922, a descendant of prominent German-American families. His father was an architect and his mother was a noted beauty. Both spoke German fluently but declined to teach Kurt the language in light of widespread anti-German sentiment following World War I. Family money helped send Vonnegut’s two siblings to private schools. The Great Depression hit hard in the 1930s, though, and the family placed Kurt in public school while it moved to more modest accommodations. While in high school, Vonnegut edited the school’s daily newspaper.

He attended college at Cornell for a little over two years, with instructions from his father and brother to study chemistry, a subject at which he did not excel. He also wrote for the Cornell Daily Sun. In 1943 he enlisted in the U.S. Army. In 1944 his mother committed suicide, and Vonnegut was taken prisoner following the Battle of the Bulge, in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium. After the war, Vonnegut married and entered a master’s degree program in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He also worked as a reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. His master’s thesis, titled Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales, was rejected. He departed for Schenectady, New York, to take a job in public relations at a General Electric research laboratory. Vonnegut left GE in 1951 to devote himself full-time to writing. During the 1950s, Vonnegut published short stories in national magazines. Player Piano, his first novel, appeared in 1952.

Sirens of Titan was published in 1959, followed by Mother Night (1962), Cat’s Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rose-water (1965), and his most highly praised work, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Vonnegut wrote prolifically until his death in 2007. Slaughterhouse-Five treats one of the most horrific massacres in European history—the World War II firebombing of Dresden, a city in eastern Germany, on February 13, 1945—with mock-serious humor and clear antiwar sentiment. More than 130,000 civilians died in Dresden, roughly the same number of deaths that resulted from the Allied bombing raids on Tokyo and from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, both of which also occurred in 1945. Inhabitants of Dresden were incinerated or suffocated in a matter of hours as a firestorm sucked up and consumed available oxygen. The scene on the ground was one of unimaginable destruction. The novel is based on Kurt Vonnegut’s own experience in World War II.

In the novel, a prisoner of war witnesses and survives the Allied forces’ firebombing of Dresden. Vonnegut, like his pro-tagonist Billy Pilgrim, emerged from a meat locker beneath a slaughter-house into the moonscape of burned-out Dresden. His surviving captors put him to work finding, burying, and burning bodies. His task continued until the Russians came and the war ended. Vonnegut survived by chance, confined as a prisoner of war (POW) in a well-insulated meat locker, and so missed the cataclysmic moment of attack, emerging the day after into the charred ruins of a once-beautiful cityscape. Vonnegut has said that he always intended to write about the experience but found himself incapable of doing so for more than twenty years. Although he attempted to describe in simple terms what happened and to create a linear narrative, this strategy never worked for him. Billy Pilgrim’s unhinged time—shifting, a mechanism for dealing with the unfathomable aggression and mass destruction he witnesses, is Vonnegut’s solution to the problem of telling an untellable tale. Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five as a response to war.

“It is so short and jumbled and jangled,” he explains in Chapter 1, “because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” The jumbled structure of the novel and the long delay between its conception and completion serve as testaments to a very personal struggle with heart-wrenching material. But the timing of the novel’s publication also deserves notice: in 1969, the United States was in the midst of the dismal Vietnam War. Vonnegut was an outspoken pacifist and critic of the conflict. Slaughterhouse-Five revolves around the willful incineration of 100,000 civilians, in a city of extremely dubious military significance, during an arguably just war. Appearing when it did, then, Slaughterhouse-Five made a forceful statement about the campaign in Vietnam, a war in which incendiary technology was once more being employed against nonmilitary targets in the name of a dubious cause.

More Help 15 Things You May Not Know About 'Slaughterhouse-Five' | Mental Floss 15 Things You May Not Know About 'Slaughterhouse-Five' filed under: books Like us on Facebook Based on his experiences as a POW during the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is (rightfully) considered a modern literary masterpiece. It propelled Vonnegut, who had been largely ignored and classified as a sci-fi paperback writer, to fame and literary acclaim. The novel follows Billy Pilgrim, a man who has become "unstuck in time," and weaves together different periods of his life—his time as a hapless soldier, his post-war optometry career, and a foray in an alien zoo where he served as an exhibit—with humor and profundity.

"The dominant theme of what I have written during the past forty-five years or so,” Vonnegut wrote in 1994, “is the inhumanity of many of man’s inventions to man.” Here are 15 things you may not have known about this 1969 classic (not that the dates matter to Tralfamadorians): 1. After repeated and failed attempts to start his "Dresden book," Vonnegut finally began what would become Slaughterhouse-Five during a two-year teaching stint at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He had stopped writing fiction and was in a considerable funk when he accepted the invitation, offered by his former editor George Starbuck who was a full-time professor of English at the university. 2. He credits the program for rekindling his love of literature. "At Iowa I was suddenly friends with Nelson Algren and Jose Donoso and Vance Bourjaily and Donald Justice...and was amazed. Suddenly writing seemed very important again.

This was better than a transplant of monkey glands for a man my age." He also became friends with Richard Yates while there, and some of his students included Gail Godwin, John Irving, Jonathan Penner, Bruce Dobler, John Casey, and Jane Casey. 3. Impressed by the book reviews Vonnegut wrote during his hiatus from fiction, publisher Seymour Lawrence offered Vonnegut a $25,000 advance to work on his Dresden book (and two other novels) full-time. 4. Published on March 31, 1969, Slaughterhouse-Five became an instant and surprise hit. It spent sixteen weeks on the New York Times best seller list and went through five printings by July. 5. The novel owes much of its immediate success to two rave reviews; one in the New York Times Book Review, which was featured on the section's front page, and another in the Saturday Review. 6. Robert Scholes, who wrote the Times review, was a colleague of Vonnegut's at Iowa.

As Jerome Kinkowitz writes in The Vonnegut Effect, “A correlation exists between the first two major reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five: each was written by a critic who had heard Vonnegut speak to audiences, and who had been, moreover, impressed by the personal voice in the author’s fictive statement. Not that public speaking was Vonnegut’s chosen profession; rather, his talk at Notre Dame University’s Literary Festival (as heard by Granville Hicks) and his two-year lectureship at the University of Iowa (where Robert Scholes was a colleague) were stopgap measures to generate some income after his customary publishing markets had either closed or ceased to respond." 7. Slaughterhouse-Five was banned from Oakland County, Michigan public schools in 1972. The circuit judge there accused the novel of being “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian.” In 1973, a school board in North Dakota immolated 32 copies of the book in the high school's coal burner. “My books are being thrown out of school libraries all over the country—because they’re supposedly obscene," Vonnegut told the Paris Review.

"I’ve seen letters to small-town newspapers that put Slaughterhouse-Five in the same class with Deep Throat and Hustler magazine. How could anybody masturbate to Slaughterhouse-Five?” 8. Slaughterhouse-Five is still being banned in schools. In 2011, Wesley Scroggins, an assistant professor at Missouri State University, called on the Republic, MO school board to ban Vonnegut's novel. He wrote in the local paper, “This is a book that contains so much profane language, it would make a sailor blush with shame. The ‘f word’ is plastered on almost every other page. The content ranges from naked men and women in cages together so that others can watch them having sex to God telling people that they better not mess with his loser, bum of a son, named Jesus Christ.” The board eventually voted 4-0 to remove the novel from the high school curriculum and its library. 9. In response to this ban, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis gave away 150 free copies of Slaughterhouse-Five to Republic, Missouri students who wanted to read it. 10.

The American Library Association listed the book as the 46th most banned or challenged book of the first decade of the 21st century. 11. A film adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five directed by George Roy Hill and starring Michael Sacks as Billy Pilgrim was produced in 1972. Vonnegut called it "flawless." 12. The character "Wild Bob" is based on William Joseph Cody Garlow, grandson of Buffalo Bill Cody and commander of the 423rd regiment in World War II. A private in that regiment, Vonnegut was captured along with Garlow on December 19, 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge. 13. While Vonnegut fills the novel with non-fiction asides and excerpts from real accounts, the pornographic postcard carried around by Roland Weary depicting a woman with a pony flanked by doric columns is non-existent; the story of the photographer André Le Fèvre is completely fictionalized. However, the name "André Le Fèvre" may come from André Lefèvre, a famous French scoutmaster—the equivalent of a Boy Scout leader. 14.

In a "Special Message" written for the Franklin Library's limited edition of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut writes, “The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is... One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I’m in.” 15. "So it goes," the book's melancholic refrain, appears in the text 106 times. More from mental_floss... Slaughterhouse Five Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse Five as well as many other novels. Slaughterhouse Five is the story of Billy Pilgrim. Pilgrim is a time traveling war veteran who is "unstuck" in ... Slaughterhouse Five The emotions of self-pity and guilt for one s self play a major role in the novel Slaughterhouse Five. This leads to be one of the more interesting aspects of the novel and most other military stories.

When one begins to analyze a military novel it is important to first look at the historical context in which the book was written. On the nights of February 13-14 in 1944 the city of Dresden, Germany was subjected to slaughterhouse five Slaughterhouse-Five By: Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse five is a very complex and twisted story about a World War Two veteran. The story is set in three different time periods ... one of the worst air attacks in the history of man. By the end of the bombing 135,000 to 250,000 people had been killed by the combined forces of the United States and the United Kingdom. Dresden was different then Berlin or many of the other military targets which were attacked during World War II because it was never fortified or used for strategic purposes and, therefore, was not considered a military target. Because of it is apparent safety, thousands Slaughterhouse Five Slaughterhouse-Five Critics often suggest that Kurt Vonnegut s novels represent a man s desperate, yet, futile search for meaning in a senseless existence. Vonnegut s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, displays this ...

of refugees from all over Europe converged on Dresden for protection. Dresden's neutrality was broken and the resulting attacks laid waste, what Vonnegut called, the Florence of the Elbe. Kurt Vonnegut was a witness to this event and because of fate, had been spared. He wrote Slaughterhouse Five to answer the question that resounded through his head long after the bombs could no longer be heard. Why me? A frequent question asked by survivors Slaughterhouse Five Is The Choice Really Ours?: Determinism Versus Free Will in Slaughterhouse Five Is the life of each individual already planned? Is each turn their life takes just in the ... of war. Vonnegut was tormented by this question and through Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist in Slaughterhouse Five, he attempts to reconcile the guilt which one feels when one is randomly saved from death, while one's friends and loved ones perish. Billy Pilgrim s own life was spared, but was never able to live with himself knowing that so many others had died.

The feelings of guilt which emerged from his having survived the bombing of Dresden and from Billy's fortunate Slaughterhouse Five Many writers in history have written science fiction novels and had great success with them, but only a few have been as enduring over time as Kurt Vonnegut s Slaughterhouse-Five. ... escape from death under the shelter of the fifth Slaughterhouse haunted Billy through much of his life. Billy Pilgrim did not consider his survival a blessing, but a curse. A curse to be forced to live on with the guilt of survival. Billy Pilgrim faced such tremendous guilt, that he spent his entire life after Dresden trying to alleviate himself of it. His guilt is in many ways comparable to the guilt felt by the survivors of the Holocaust. Slaughterhouse Five Slaughterhouse Five The emotions of self-pity and guilt for one s self play a major role in the novel Slaughterhouse Five. This leads to be one of the more interesting ... Many Holocaust survivors had to face their own Why me? question. However, many Holocaust survivors were able to reconcile their feelings of guilt or put it out of their minds. This solution was never viable for Billy Pilgrim.

Billy s guilt made life so unbearable that he could no longer live with himself and he rejected the life that had been granted to him. There was no answer to Billy s question because war is not logical, nor Slaughterhouse Five Universal Essay: Slaughterhouse Five Throughout history, society, in general, has been molded by the ravages of war. From King Henry VII's invasion of Brittany, to the bloodshed on the shores ... is it just. Never could one give a justification for the fortuitous slaughtering of the innocent, which claimed the lives of Dresden s inhabitants. This idea is exemplified in the secondary title Slaughterhouse Five is known by, The Children s Crusade. The Children s Crusade was one of the many Christian Holy Wars, which aimed on destroying the Muslim people. The Children s Crusade was really a ploy by entrepreneurs to sell Christian children into slavery. Thousands of children were Slaughterhouse Five Slaughterhouse FiveSlaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was written as a general statement against all wars. The novel can be divided into several distinct stories all combined to convey one ... killed on ships en-route to the slave market and many others were sold, never to be seen again.

Vonnegut gives the Children's Crusade as an example of the atrocities and in-humane acts, which transpire under the auspices of War. That is why Billy Pilgrim invents a world where a justification can be given, where life and death are meaningless and feelings of guilt disappear. The only way Billy Pilgrim can confront this guilt is to excuse his survival and trivialize Slaughterhouse Five This first chapter, a preface, is insistent on the fact that the book is based on real events. Vonnegut, like our narrator, is a veteran of World War II, a ... the gift of life and the cruelty of death. He creates a new world where he can be free from his guilt. That world is called Tralfamador. The Traflamadorian world provided Billy Pilgrim with the escape that he needed from his guilt. The Traflamadorian people are not locked in a three dimensional realm. They are not locked in the frames of time to which the human world is forced to live in. Traflamadorians can shift through time as seamlessly slaughterhouse five Slaughterhouse-Five 1.

Explore the use of "So it goes." Is it to be viewed as resignation to the horrors of death? Is it Billy's response? Vonnegut's? ... as humans can walk towards a point. This ability allows them to focus on the pleasant moments in the history of the Universe and ignore the aspects of time they dislike. Thus, the fire-bombing of Dresden is just a tiny frame in the vast space time continuum. The guilt of Billy s being saved is reconciled by eliminating the existence of a past, present, and future. Since any fraction of time is accessible in the Tralfamadorian world death is just Slaughterhouse Five This first chapter, a preface, is insistent on the fact that the book is based on real events. Vonnegut, like our narrator, is a veteran of World War II, a ... a tiny part of existence that is ignored like the fire-bombing of Dresden. Billy Pilgrim reinvents himself and his universe to gain purpose in his guilt ridden life. The Tralfamadorians are real to Billy because without them he cannot live with himself.

Billy believes that a Tralfamadorian ship took him to be an exhibit of a human being in a Tralfamadorian Zoo. On Tralfamador, Billy is exposed to an entire new way of thinking which neutralizes the Slaughterhouse - Five Slaughterhouse-Five 1. Explore the use of "So it goes." Is it to be viewed as resignation to the horrors of death? Is it Billy's response? Vonnegut's? Yours? âSo it goesâ ... Why me? question. While the Tralfamadores where transporting Billy to Tralfamador, he asked Why Me . The Tralfamadores responded Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. In the Tralfamadorian view of the Universe, guilt does not exist because in their view one is not responsible for one's actions. Whatever will, or has happened will always happen and did always happen. There is no way to change the course Slaughterhouse Five Slaughterhouse five is a very complex and twisted story about a World War Two veteran. The story is set in three different time periods of hisâ life. His name is ... of events.

Everything is predetermined. Billy is told by the Tralfamadores, regarding Tralfamador, that: Today we do, have peace. On other days we have wars as horrible as any you ve ever seen or read about. There isn t anything we can do about them, so we simply don t look at them. We ignore them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments. The Tralfamadorians even now when and who will destroy the Universe, yet they Slaughterhouse Five Slaughterhouse Five When one begins to analyze a military novel it is important to first look at the historical context in which the book was written. On the nights of ... make no attempt to stop it because in their eyes it cannot be stopped. Billy, by accepting the Tralfamadorian view, frees himself from the guilt which one feels when one is locked in time and responsible for one s actions. Billy Pilgrim grasps the Tralfamadorian philosophy and insists the Tralfamadorian world exists because it eliminates the Why me? question.

Guilt is defined as a feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, crime or wrong-doing ;a feeling Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote “Slaughterhouse-Five,” dies at age 84 | The Seattle Times Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote “Slaughterhouse-Five,” dies at age 84 Originally published April 12, 2007 at 12:00 am Updated April 12, 2007 at 9:50 am Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works... Share story Cristian Salazar NEW YORK — Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Breakfast of Champions” and “Cat’s Cradle,” died Wednesday. He was 84. Mr. Vonnegut, who often marveled he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking habit, suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago, said his wife, noted photographer Jill Krementz.

The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, and dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Mr. Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic. His experience as a prisoner of war in the 1940s in Germany was the basis for “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which was published while the United States waged war in Vietnam. “Slaughterhouse-Five” is listed 18th on Modern Library’s list of 100 best novels. Most Read Stories Unlimited Digital Access. $1 for 4 weeks. “There was never a kinder and, at the same time, wittier writer to be with personally,” said author Tom Wolfe, a friend of Vonnegut’s. ” He’s the closest thing we had to a Voltaire. He could be extremely funny, but there was a vein of iron always underneath it.” An obscure science-fiction writer for two decades before earning mainstream acclaim in 1969 with “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Mr. Vonnegut was an American original, often compared to Mark Twain for a vision that combined social criticism, wildly black humor and a call to basic human decency.

He was, novelist Jay MacInerny once said, “a satirist with a heart, a moralist with a whoopee cushion.” Mr. Vonnegut lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he believed were dehumanizing people. “I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations,” Mr. Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists. A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Mr. Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view. He filled his novels with satirical commentary and drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot. “My motives are political,” he once told Playboy magazine. “I agree with Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini that the writer should serve his society.

… Mainly, I think they should be — and biologically have to be — agents of change.” On another occasion he explained that his goal in writing novels was to “catch people before they become generals and senators and presidents” and “poison their minds with humanity. Encourage them to make a better world.” “Slaughterhouse-Five” was a book he tried but failed to write for 25 years. An agile mix of fantasy and Mr. Vonnegut’s World War II experiences, it features a time traveler who, like Mr. Vonnegut, survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden. Unorthodox in structure and patently anti-war, the novel resonated with a rebellious younger generation. Mr. Vonnegut became an icon of the countercultural 1970s and his book became a milestone of post-modern American literature, unequaled in force or artistry by his later novels. Despite his commercial success, Mr. Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide. His mother killed herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge.

He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs created a firestorm that killed an estimated 135,000 people. “The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote in “Fates Worse Than Death,” his 1991 autobiography of sorts. But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other prisoners of war in an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five. In the novel, Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time-traveling aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. “He was sort of like nobody else,” said Gore Vidal, who noted that he, Mr. Vonnegut and Norman Mailer were among the last writers around who served in World War II. The Indianapolis native retired from novel writing in his later years but continued to publish short articles. He had a best-seller in 2005 with “A Man Without a Country,” a collection of his nonfiction, including jabs at the Bush administration (“upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography”) and the uncertain future of the planet. Mr.

Vonnegut adopted his sister’s three children after she died. He also had three children with his first wife, Ann Cox, and adopted a daughter, Lily, with Krementz, his second wife. Material from the Lost Angeles Times and Bloomberg News is included in this report. Cristian Salazar

Question: Who wrote the novel 'Slaughterhouse Five'?
Answer: Kurt Vonnegut